NYTimes.com: Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So Are Scientists

27 views
Skip to first unread message

Glenn Hampson

unread,
Apr 10, 2021, 12:45:11 PM4/10/21
to osi20...@googlegroups.com

From The New York Times this morning is this summary of a research paper concluding that “scientific papers containing lots of specialized terminology are less likely to be cited by other researchers.” Conversely, papers containing specialized terminology are more likely to get grant funding. This is confirmation of the science communication dynamic we’ve been complaining about for, well, over a decade now---that we’re ramping up requirements to speak in code to one another, but this requirement is actually harming our ability to share work with others, even within fields. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/science/science-jargon-caves.html?smid=em-share. Changing this dynamic is much more complicated and challenging than simply training scientists to communicate more clearly, which is often ineffective anyway because clear writing is only part of the challenge, but also because science rewards research, with limited honors for excellence in teaching and outreach.

David Wojick

unread,
Apr 10, 2021, 12:55:02 PM4/10/21
to Glenn Hampson, osi20...@googlegroups.com
It is probably a law of communication that the less specialized the language, the more people can read it. But in many cases this makes the findings less precise, which may explain why the more specialized findings get more grants.

Communication versus precision.

David

On Apr 10, 2021, at 1:45 PM, Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org> wrote:



From The New York Times this morning is this summary of a research paper concluding that “scientific papers containing lots of specialized terminology are less likely to be cited by other researchers.” Conversely, papers containing specialized terminology are more likely to get grant funding. This is confirmation of the science communication dynamic we’ve been complaining about for, well, over a decade now---that we’re ramping up requirements to speak in code to one another, but this requirement is actually harming our ability to share work with others, even within fields. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/science/science-jargon-caves.html?smid=em-share. Changing this dynamic is much more complicated and challenging than simply training scientists to communicate more clearly, which is often ineffective anyway because clear writing is only part of the challenge, but also because science rewards research, with limited honors for excellence in teaching and outreach.

--
As a public and publicly-funded effort, the conversations on this list can be viewed by the public and are archived. To read this group's complete listserv policy (including disclaimer and reuse information), please visit http://osinitiative.org/osi-listservs.
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Open Scholarship Initiative" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to osi2016-25+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/osi2016-25/001f01d72e28%24dd3a6440%2497af2cc0%24%40nationalscience.org.

Glenn Hampson

unread,
Apr 10, 2021, 1:22:52 PM4/10/21
to David Wojick, osi20...@googlegroups.com

I don’t disagree with your point, David, but do think we’re shooting science in the foot with our mindset that academic writing must be impenetrable.

 

Diagram, text Description automatically generated

image001.jpg

Bryan Alexander

unread,
Apr 10, 2021, 2:19:43 PM4/10/21
to David Wojick, Glenn Hampson, The Open Scholarship Initiative
Reminds me of a cute bit in Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress (1971). There is so much scholarship available in the future that researchers refer to key ideas not by jargon, but by numbers. They do this in presentations to save time, reading out loud like: "1, 673, 22, and therefore 78."
People in the audience can respond: "But 291!"

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/osi2016-25/C82AE23E-65DB-4C91-B841-2E7CA7B177EA%40craigellachie.us.


--

David Wojick

unread,
Apr 10, 2021, 2:39:30 PM4/10/21
to Glenn Hampson, osi20...@googlegroups.com
Academic writing and reporting research findings are two different things. Science has specialized language to talk about specific things for which general language has no words. That much impenetrability is necessary.

David

On Apr 10, 2021, at 2:22 PM, Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org> wrote:



I don’t disagree with your point, David, but do think we’re shooting science in the foot with our mindset that academic writing must be impenetrable.

 

<image001.jpg>

Glenn Hampson

unread,
Apr 10, 2021, 2:48:05 PM4/10/21
to David Wojick, osi20...@googlegroups.com

At the margins, yes. But when it comes to goals like reproducibility and realities like interdisciplinarity, clearly communicating ideas and findings within research is critical. See Science is getting harder to read | Nature Index for another take on this.

JJE Esposito

unread,
Apr 10, 2021, 4:03:06 PM4/10/21
to Glenn Hampson, David Wojick, The Open Scholarship Initiative
I hold a minority position on this, but, hey!, whoever wanted to be popular? I think the Times article is ridiculous. Measuring citations along a single axis of readability, whatever that is, is too simple. The real problem is in the expectation that scientists should have a popular audience. It's crazy. It simply slows down the highly efficient exchange of the 200-300 people working in a subspecialty. The Times's editorial position is that if the world were a better place, everything would sound like the Times. Academic research is an elite activity. Let's not pretend otherwise.

Popularization is another matter. It's important and requires real writing talent. I just finished Katie Mack's outstanding "The End of Everything, Astrophysically Speaking." I can't imagine how much effort went into writing that book. And even with all that effort, it is futile unless you are Katie Mack.

Joe Esposito

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/osi2016-25/004f01d72e3a%24089fa4e0%2419deeea0%24%40nationalscience.org.


--
Joseph J. Esposito
espo...@gmail.com
@josephjesposito
+Joseph Esposito

T Scott Plutchak

unread,
Apr 10, 2021, 4:42:43 PM4/10/21
to JJE Esposito, Glenn Hampson, David Wojick, The Open Scholarship Initiative
The DeBakey sisters spent their long, illustrious careers in the service of getting scientists to be better writers.  That’s a real problem.  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5098583/  But they understood the needs of different audiences and they were primarily concerned with scientists doing a better job of communicating to other scientists.  Scientists need jargon in order to be precise.  Communicating the broad outlines of science to a generalist, reasonably educated audience is quite another issue, as Joe quite rightly points out.  The NYT article ironically muddles all of this by neglecting the challenges of writing for different audiences.  And, of course, the article that the NYT writer is riffing off of is more nuanced than it appears in the NYT fluff.  The authors suggest that limiting the use of jargon in titles and abstracts would increase the likelihood of a paper being selected to be read, and therefore cited, from among the flood of papers that a scientist is trying to keep up with.  They acknowledge the necessity of using jargon in those parts of the paper that require the specificity that jargon delivers.  

Scott

T Scott Plutchak
Librarian
Epistemologist
Birmingham, Alabama

David Wojick

unread,
Apr 10, 2021, 5:33:59 PM4/10/21
to Glenn Hampson, osi20...@googlegroups.com
Amusingly I do not know what you are saying because I do not understand what "margins" means in this context. 

As for reproducibility, only experts who know the language can do that. I suspect lack of specificity is a much bigger problem. Journal articles are not designed to convey the detailed procedures used to create research results. Nor are they designed for interdisciplinary communication. 

David

On Apr 10, 2021, at 3:47 PM, Glenn Hampson <gham...@nationalscience.org> wrote:



David Wojick

unread,
Apr 10, 2021, 5:42:23 PM4/10/21
to Glenn Hampson, osi20...@googlegroups.com
For the record, in my Ph.D. thesis I formulated a new theory of the nature of scientific language. It turned out to be a Luther moment, in that it implied that what my committee taught was false. Much controversy followed. I was lucky to escape with the degree.

Very funny in retrospect but at the time not so much.

David

On Apr 10, 2021, at 6:33 PM, David Wojick <dwo...@craigellachie.us> wrote:

Amusingly I do not know what you are saying because I do not understand what "margins" means in this context. 

Lisa Hinchliffe

unread,
Apr 10, 2021, 5:52:36 PM4/10/21
to JJE Esposito, Glenn Hampson, David Wojick, The Open Scholarship Initiative
I'm 100% with you Joe. As a librarian, I've spent my career careening through the literatures of almost every field. It's fine that I can't understand them all.

Tressie McMillian Cottom speaks to this in another way in her most recent piece in essaying :

"Had I been writing for a much broader audience in a different genre, it’s the kind of thing I maybe just would have included in the laundry list of scene-setting, just so the more typical mainstream reader would have had a place to mentally rest. I call that making room for the reader to sit down. Sometimes in an essay, I’ll know I'm moving at a really expressive clip, and in editing, I'll say to myself, Oh, Tressie, give people a place to sit down in the essay. If I’d been writing for them, that’s the kind of thing I'd have thrown in so that they can go, “Oh, yeah, that’s the thing I know,” and then they would have felt more confident in continuing to read it because they could have rested their eyes, brains, and emotions. But that is not the audience I was writing to and so I chose to leave those stories out." (https://tressie.substack.com/p/craft-youre-no-stevie-wonder)

Honestly, I think the more problematic issue is people thinking that because they know the words in social sciences literature that they understand their meaning in that specific context. 

Happy spring!
Lisa

___

Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe
lisali...@gmail.com





To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/osi2016-25/CABcSf%2Bi%2B7-Pafydgjzs3fDBxAqQYmWetgMY-z34CZZ0pLLRJAQ%40mail.gmail.com.

Wulf, Karin A

unread,
Apr 10, 2021, 5:55:37 PM4/10/21
to Lisa Hinchliffe, JJE Esposito, Glenn Hampson, David Wojick, The Open Scholarship Initiative
Hard agree.

And I don’t know too many academic disciplines that aren’t working to make some
research in their field publicly accessible.  But that’s different from saying 
that specialist work should be accessible to non-specialist readers.  

Karin

*****************
Karin Wulf
Executive Director, Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture
Professor of History, William & Mary

(Please be aware that during the pandemic voice messages will be answered more slowly than email.)



Glenn Hampson

unread,
Apr 10, 2021, 6:32:47 PM4/10/21
to Wulf, Karin A, Lisa Hinchliffe, JJE Esposito, David Wojick, The Open Scholarship Initiative

Agreed. I think there’s an either/or implication here: that either journals use specialized language, or they don’t. Alex Csiszar’s great book the history of the Scientific Journal describes how throughout the history of science, there has always been a push to make research more accessible to researchers (through indexes, fiche cards, society journals, etc.), and concurs with the idea being expressed here that even by the end of the 19th century, complex science had become too specialized to have mass market readership (compared to the science of the early 19th century)

 

What I’m advocating here isn’t that researchers shouldn’t always find the best way to communicate with each other. To the contrary, if journal articles as written today effectively fit that bill, that’s great. What I’m advocating is that so much more is also possible in our age---and I’m not talking here about what Csiszar calls the “fantasy” of having communication practices that make everything open to everyone, but about being open to new ways of communicating that help build a stronger bridge between science and business, between science and policymakers, between different fields of potentially convergent research, and even within fields, where so many sub-specialties emerge that a researcher in bio sub-field 1 may not read or understand journals in bio sub-field two.

 

To this latter point, what often happens, as my few days at the NAKFI conference in 2014 demonstrated in spades, is that mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and biologists might all recognize the same basic phenomenon, but they all give this phenomenon a different name and describe it differently. What kinds of breakthroughs might we be able to make if they understood each other’s work?

 

Our choices here aren’t either/or, but all/and. Our open solutions efforts fall are part of a broader effort to try and do more…vitally important, but only part of what’s needed.

Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages